Sources of Authoritarianism in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe

Abstract

The illusion or myth that the ideas of the Enlightenment relating to the rights of man — to ‘liberty, equality fraternity’ — would gain universal acceptance in time and thus make the world safe for ‘democracy’ were shattered by the historic realities of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (in Eastern Europe, see, for example, the contributions in East European Quarterly, vol. 9 (1976)). In fact, western political and socioeconomic ideologies relating to the modernization of patriarchal-feudal societies and political theocracies through forcible or voluntary acceptance of the values and advantages of bourgeois capitalist civilization engendered violent reactions which, in our times, are designed to make the world safe for ‘autocracy’.